Video: Finding calm in the face of panic

Closed captioning of: Finding calm in the face of panic

>>>anxiety disorder
. our next guest documents her search for peace in the new book

"learning to breathe:my yearlong quest to bring calm to my life." she joins us along with psychologist dale adkins. good morning.

>>good morning.

>>here you are a happily married woman with two wonderful kids, a best-selling books. by all appearances a successful life but you say you had a
deep secret
.

>>i did. you know, i was on a plane in tulsa, oklahoma, about to take off after an extended book tour which i was very grateful for having. the secret was that everywhere i went, i felt different from everyone else on the planet. i felt anxious and i took medication which helped me enormously. i was reading about monks whose meditation practice was being studied by neuroscientists. their brains lit up on
cat scans
or mris. i said, i want the brain of a monk and everything that goes with it like peace, tranquility, loving kindness and compassion. in order to develop compassion, you have to understand your own suffering and then you can understand the suffering of others. i took a trip. i didn't know it would work. i didn't know i would be on "today." i wrote a book proposal and told a few friends. my husband said, okay. and i took off. my first retreat was with a wonderful
tibetan monk
who had
panic attacks
as child which is why i have an affinity with him. he grew up in the himalayas with
green fields
,
blue skies
and lovely parents but panic followed him like a shadow. tears just rolled down my cheeks when i heard that.

>>these
panic attacks
, it's not uncommon, is it?

>>not at all. so many people suffer from some kind of anxiety and some people have panic. the real key to priscilla's book is this is accessible to anybody. what we can all do is understand that we have this available to us, this ability to breathe, this ability to sit quietly and find stillness so we can focus. quiet our brain so we can be creative, relax and then really do what we need to do which is not run from the fear and panic but understand that it's temporary and it will go away if we kind of relax our bodies and minds.

>>i think we all can identify with the idea of having deep anxiety. this idea of having
panic attacks
, there are some people who are more predisposed. we were talking about this being a fix or a help for people who suffered deep, deep panic.

>>yes. they can be assisted. what's important to understand is that we can all be helped by this. certain people are perhaps more predisposed but it's often a result of trauma in life.

>>it could be something in the family in terms of predisposition because of inherited items.

>>absolutely.

>>or it could be because of specific trauma. you talked in your book about having had some trauma. here's the thing people want to know. now that we have disclosed the problem, what's the first step? what is the one thing above all that makes you, in those moments of panic and fear calm down?

>>i did something called endr therapy which is fantastic. we do it a lot with ptsd. she said to me, okay, i'm in a subway and the car stops and you're in between stations and nobody is telling you why. what do i do? i freak out. the fluorescent lights. she said, if you're sitting there i can guarantee you -- try to focus. i promise you there is one tiny spot in your body where you feel okay. where you feel grounded. focus on that spot. i did another wonderful exciting therapy where you feel that spot and pend late back and forth between the feeling of fearfulness and groundedness. meditation practice is the heart of the book. by definition when you meditate you are rooted to the reliability of the earth as my yoga teacher taught me. you feel a groundedness and strength you can build upon through your practice.

>>one of the things i think that's so useful is no matter what you're dealing with at the time whether it's being caught in the subway or wondering if ek go through a crowded room or if you're afraid to fly, you can always sit and be conscious of your breath and breathe deeply. generally when we are anxious we breathe from here. we want to have a deeper breath so we can really focus on keeping ourselves grounded, as you said. whether it's
post traumatic stress
as you were talking about or moving your eyes in a certain way, each of us has this available to us. it isn't something -- it's not related to something far out or distant. it's available all the time. we can do it ourselves. we can model for others. we can teach our children. we can really have compassion for ourselves.

>>not just a breath but a deep breath. all the details are in our book in your effort to help people and yourself. thank you so much for being generous.

Priscilla Warner was a successful author, devoted wife and loving mother on the outside, but could not find a core of stability and peace within herself. Determined to attain a state of inner tranquility, Warner began a yearlong quest to transform herself from within. "Learning to Breathe" is her account of that transformation. Here's an excerpt.

Takeoff

Slumped in my airplane seat, I could barely see enough of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to say goodbye to it in the early morning darkness. The plane took off and I was headed home to New York on the last leg of an intense three-year lecture tour. I opened a magazine . . . and there were the monks—yet again.

Dressed in crimson robes, their heads shaved, serene Tibetan men stared out at me from a photograph. These same men had been inadvertently haunting me for years, because they had found an inner peace that had eluded me for so long. While I’d been experiencing debilitating panic attacks and anxiety for decades, they had been meditating so effectively that their prefrontal brain lobes lit up on MRI scans, plumped up like perfectly ripe peaches.

That’s not precisely the way the monks’ brains were described in the medical studies I’d read about, but that’s how I imagined them—happily pregnant with positive energy. Unlike my brain, which felt battered and bruised, swollen with anxiety, adrenaline, heartache, and hormones.

I also wanted everything that went along with that brain—peace and tranquility, compassion and kindness, wisdom and patience. Was that too much to ask for?

And so my mission was born.

I became determined to get my prefrontal lobe to light up like the monks’ lobes, to develop a brain that would run quietly and smoothly, instead of bouncing around in my skull like a Mexican jumping bean. Some people set up meth labs in their basements, but I wanted a Klonopin lab in my head, producing a natural version of the drug my therapist had prescribed for me several years earlier, to help me cope with chronic anxiety and panic.

I had already been searching for serenity on and off for forty years, during which I’d traveled to Turkey and toured the ancient caves of early Christian mystics, read Rumi’s exquisite Sufi poetry, and learned about the mysteries of Kabbalah. I regularly drank herbal tea and lit incense in my bedroom. And I’d gotten my meridians massaged while my chakras were tended to by soft-spoken attendants at occasional spa splurges.

I would have loved to travel to Nepal to find inner peace, sitting at the feet of a monk on a mountaintop, but I panic at high altitudes. I didn’t want to move to a monastery, but I figured there were dozens of things I could do in my own backyard that could make me positively monk-like. So I decided to try behaving like a monk while still shopping for dinner at my local suburban strip mall. And I decided to chronicle my adventures.

This full-scale brain renovation would take some time, planning, improvisation, and hard work. Still, I hoped, if I exercised my tired gray cells properly, on a sustained, regular basis, and fed my brain all sorts of good things like meditation, guided imagery, yoga, macrobiotic stuff, and Buddhist teachings, maybe it would change physically. I’d heard neuroplasticity thrown around in scientific reports, a term that means that the brain is supposedly able to transform itself at any age. Perhaps mine would be like Silly Putty—bendable and pliable and lots of fun to work with.

What did I have to lose? I shifted in my airplane seat, the monks still gazing up at me from the photograph.

On the outside, I was functioning just fine: I was a happily married mother of two terrific sons. I’d traveled to more than fifty cities around the country to promote a bestselling book I’d coauthored, called "The Faith Club." But inside, the anxiety disorder I’d battled all my life had left me exhausted, out of shape, and devouring chocolate to boost my spirits and busted adrenal glands. My body and heart ached for my children, who had left the nest, and my mother, who was in her ninth year of Alzheimer’s disease, confined to the advanced care unit of her nursing home. Twenty years earlier, my father had died from cancer; but he’d been just about my age when the tumor had started its deadly journey through his colon.

Clearly, I was facing my own mortality. Although I wanted to run like hell away from it.

In another rite of passage, a wonderful therapist I had seen for many years had died recently, and I had attended her memorial service. When I’d arrived at the Jewish funeral home, a woman with a shaved head, dressed in a simple dark outfit, had greeted me. Although her smile was kind, her presence initially threw me off. Was she Buddhist? Was she a nun? Did her brain light up on an MRI scan, too?

After greeting people at the entrance to the chapel with a calm that put everyone at ease, she conducted the proceedings with warmth, wit, and sensitivity, urging people to speak about our deceased friend. I took her appearance to be a message from my late shrink.

I didn’t know the difference between my dharma and my karma, but I was willing to learn. Perhaps I’d define other terms for myself, like mindfulness, lovingkindness, and maybe even true happiness. I’d try whatever techniques, treatments, and teachings I thought might move me along the road from panic to peace.

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, believes human beings can change the negative emotions in their brains into positive ones.